President of Tribune Publishing Reassures Times Employees, L.A.

Jack Fuller, president of Tribune Publishing, pledged Friday to uphold the editorial independence of the Los Angeles Times and continue its tradition of strong local, national and foreign coverage if the proposed merger of Times Mirror Co. and the Chicago-based Tribune Co. is completed.

Fuller, talking with Los Angeles Times employees at two meetings, said he will decide soon whether to retain the current top management.

The Tribune and Times Mirror majority owners this week announced a tentative agreement that will allow the Tribune to purchase The Times’ parent company for about $6 billion.

“It’s just too early for me to know anyone on your team, except . . . that I know your team altogether puts out a wonderful newspaper,” Fuller told a group of about 300 reporters, editors and other editorial department staffers during the afternoon session.

Announcement of the sale Monday caught Times employees by surprise. The meetings Friday were their first opportunity to question top Tribune management about its intentions for The Times.

“I can promise you that there will be change,” Fuller said. “What I can also promise you is that there will be no abandonment of principle or the purposes that I think we all share.”

Fuller, a former reporter, editorial writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune, said his company is one that “operates with integrity--not just on the news side . . . but on the business side too.”

Fuller also said the company believes in “editorial independence.”

“Our newspapers are edited where they are. They are not edited from Chicago,” said Fuller, who was introduced by Times Publisher Kathryn M. Downing and Editor Michael Parks.

With competitors getting “bigger and bigger,” Fuller described the proposed merger with Times Mirror as “strategically significant because it gave the combined company a backbone of a network that included Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City.”

The combined company will be based in Chicago and have 11 daily newspapers, 22 television stations and four radio stations, and will be active in the Internet and new media.

With Times employees fearing that layoffs may result from the purchase, Fuller said there were no plans to reduce costs by cutting the newspaper’s payroll. He did say that because of the merger, jobs with the parent Times Mirror firm would be lost.

“Layoffs are not in my mind,” he said. “When we looked into this, that is not what we were thinking about.”

He said savings would be made by standardization and centralization of corporate functions.

Fuller also addressed concerns expressed by local leaders about whether Times Mirror’s charitable and cultural activities will continue.

Fuller said the Tribune also has a long tradition of supporting local philanthropies.

“We believe in communities and the relationship of a newspaper and the community,” he said. “We are deep believers in being philanthropically engaged in the communities that we deal with. We surely feel that editorially we’re engaged in a leadership way, but philanthropically with money as well.”

He also sought to allay fears of editors and reporters that the new ownership would reduce The Times’ large foreign and national staffs.